Tales that old homes tell often hint at past lives

November 12, 2004|By Rachel Gottlieb, Tribune Newspapers.

The small group accompanying famed ghost hunter Lorraine Warren through the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Conn., was atwitter with anticipation in early October as it followed her into the kitchen, a room that's off limits to the public.

The room was stripped bare in preparation for a renovation; even the walls were peeled back to the original plaster. The guests gathered behind Warren in the center of the room. Executive Director John Boyer stepped forward to direct Warren's attention to a square filled with plaster. Nearby, three circular holes that once held a speaker system were also filled in with plaster.

The words "Most Certainly" were written in pencil in beautiful cursive on the larger square. Boyer wanted to know who wrote it and why.

Warren reached out, rubbed her fingers over the letters. Could it be the response the servants gave when the great author buzzed the kitchen for some tea or a late-night piece of chocolate cake?

We may never know. Warren felt nothing. No spooky vibrations harking back to Samuel Clemens or his hired help. No whispers or breezes or flashing lights.

But the words hint at a story. They meant something to someone who lived in the house before the original plaster was covered. And that may have been Twain's era. Like the mystery at the Twain House, owners of old houses everywhere find reminders of the lives of former owners or construction workers who built the dwellings or repaired them.

There's the wallet containing a worker's WPA card that Prudential real estate agent Rebecca Koladis found under her bathroom floor in Hartford, Conn. There's the pair of construction shoes that Larry Knee, owner of Brianna's Bed & Breakfast in New Britain, Conn., found in a section of wall he was repairing in his 125-year-old house. And there are the shoes in a wall and a sketch of a ship on an original plaster wall in the Durham, Conn., house where Moses Austin, founder of the state of Texas, grew up.

The surprises that owners find when they renovate conjure the era of days gone by. Some owners find fool's gold behind the plaster walls, and there are whispers of houses with graves in their basements. Diane Jacobson of Berlin says the former owners of her house found a child's headstone in their basement and put it in her stone wall.

Koladis tells of a homeowner in Hartford who found a staircase concealed behind a wall and of a whole kitchen that her brother found behind a kitchen wall in a Minnesota house. "It was creepy," she says. "You half-expected to find a person sitting at the table."

Matthew Warshauer, a history professor at Central Connecticut State University, recounts the tale of a homeowner in Chicago who found old movie posters in perfect condition that were being used for insulation in a wall. "Many were one of a kind," he says. "They sold for a half million dollars."

Most treasures are fun to find and sometimes symbolic. Shoes, for example, were believed to bring good luck. So Knee is putting the shoes he found back in the wall "because I don't want bad luck," and he'll add a pair of his own and seal up the spot with plexiglass so visitors can enjoy them.

But sometimes an old house has a life of its own--ghosts. There are whole books written on the otherworldly inhabitants of old houses. Lisa Caswell's new book, "Northern Connecticut Tales," describes hauntings and mysteries. Jacobson, whose house had the headstone in the basement, is convinced a ghost lingers in her home.

"But it's a friendly ghost. We think our ghost is happy we live here."

Adornments on houses tell stories too.

Mary Jean Agostini, who teaches a class about old houses to real estate agents, talks of murals that artists painted on walls in houses in exchange for food or shelter. The murals are found more commonly in houses along the shore and in Fairfield County, particularly in Greek Revival homes. Some of the artists ended up becoming famous.

"People cut them out of their houses and sell them," she says.

William Gillespie, owner of the Moses Austin house in Durham, won't be selling the image of the ship that he and his wife found on a board wall in a bedroom. On the contrary, he built a door in his new wall so that he could open it to view the chalk drawing. Above the picture, "M. Austin" signifies the drawing's artist. The way Gillespie figures it, the authorship is authentic.

The house was built in 1743; Austin was born in 1761, and the wall was built in 1765, when his father expanded the house to add a tavern, Gillespie says. Young Moses could have drawn on the lower level of the board wall before it was later hidden.

"That's pretty exciting because Moses Austin started Texas," Gillespie says. Austin, Texas, was named for the family.

Sometimes a thing as innocuous as a stripe around a chimney can tell something about the lives the house has touched. When the Underground Railroad was active, people who wanted to mark their homes as safe houses for fleeing slaves painted their chimneys white with a black stripe.